#rig

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act. ↗

— John Patrick Shanley

#good #good-vs-evil #religion #right #wrong

The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#god #religion #scripture #violence #women-s-rights

It seems to me there is less meanness in atheism, by a good measure. It seems that the spirit of religious self-righteousness this article deplores is precisely the spirit in which it is written. Of course he's right about many things, one of them being the destructive potency of religious self-righteousness. (p. 146) ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#religion #self-righteousness #religion

Some folks insist that believing in animal rights is like a religion. But religion asks followers to believe in things nobody can see, while animal rights advocates ask followers to see things nobody can believe. ↗

— Craig Burton

#religion #religion

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm. ↗

— Nick Cohen

#arabs #bigotry #britain #islam #islamism

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness. ↗

— Immanuel Wallerstein

#capitalism #human-rights #religion #universalism #religion

[M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin. ↗

— Joseph de Maistre

#god #original-sin #religion #sin #religion

Immorality is the word we use to describe people that are not sinning the same way we are. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#church #hypocrisy #hypocrites #immorality #judgement

When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words: 'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?' 'I am sorry... I fear not.' 'You see where you are now! ↗

— Charles Ricketts

#empathy #oscar-wilde #religion #self-righteousness #religion

The problem with Christianity is more people profess the truth than live it. So much hypocrisy abounds that I can no longer say I count myself among them without being held to the same unachievable standard. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#fake #false #hypocrisy #immorality #judgement